Maldone

Synopsis

Maldone is a canal worker, happy with his life after running away from his family estate. He falls in love with Zita, a young gypsy girl, during a local fete. However, after his brother dies, Maldone is called back to manage the estate.

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Maldone's Gypsy heart cannot abide a life of ease and luxury. He rejects bourgeois life and the "oppression of contentment" in this exquisite Avant-Garde Narrative by Jean Grémillon, one of the greatest French filmmakers of the Silent Era (and beyond).

4,5. 35mm, rewatch. A Marxist variation of doppelgänger: the proletarian is the one who kills his reflection of great bourgeois in the mirror and resumes his previous life of a free bum, a kind of "Boudoux qui retourne aux eaux", libertarian, anti-bourgeois. The images follow the agony and vertigo of the protagonist, as only non-talkies cinema made it: rising it in a pictorial free composition, towards the whirlwind.